0:01 - Andy
all right we're live we're gonna do our preview walk for the podcast so we this is our second time doing it as a walk and it's a little different format maybe than what we've done before used to so this is our second time doing it but what are we covering today Madeline we had Mark Griffey on the show today or are going to have yeah this is normally a time about the entirety of the show, who the guest is, what their profession is, how they fit into the AEC world.

0:35 - Madeline
We go over what he wants to ask in the curveball, things like that. So, who is he?

0:42 - Andy
So, Mark Riffey, he's the CEO of Intercalc, which is a software company, and I've been using this software for almost my whole career, which does structural engineering software. For steel, concrete, wood, pretty much anything you can imagine. And Mark has an interesting story that he wanted to share about the history of Intercalc. It has some interesting core values that they adhere to. And I don't know, I just thought that it was gonna be interesting to talk about. And I thought our structural engineering listeners would like to hear it. Also, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, and business standpoint, I think our business owner, architects and engineers could benefit from it. So I think there was a lot of things that I thought that would be helpful for talking to Mark today.

1:38 - Madeline
Yeah, for sure.

1:40 - Andy
And really for me, it's like I mentioned, I've used this software for a long time, so I highly respect the company. I highly respect Mark. So for me, it was something that I was really intrigued with learning about the history of Intercalc and the program. So that's really what the show's about today. So I'm excited to get into it.

2:04 - Madeline
And did you have any idea for what you were going to do for the curveball?

2:07 - Andy
Curveball opener. So we do use AI, by the way. My assistant, Jessica, she's our podcast manager. She's got one. You know Jessica, of course. But Jessica has our Kerbal as if you're going to debug quote-unquote, which is kind of a software thing, but if you're gonna debug a business owners problems that you might see in the AEC world, what would it be? So like you see a lot of repeat bugs that may be business owners in the AEC world.

2:45 - Madeline
What would your answer for that be?

2:48 - Andy
Oh man, well Well, you know, the E-Myth comes to my current quick mind. The E-Myth is a book, and the E-Myth concept is that you work in the business too much as a technician, as an engineer in my case, and doing the designs, doing the things, and not working on the business in terms of building the systems and the processes to better yourself and to better the actual business itself. And thinking about how to get new work and those type of things. So I think lacking in processes, lacking in systems is really what it ultimately boils down to. So my name's Andy Richardson. This is Madeline, our producer, and this is the Enhanced podcast. I've been doing this 27 years with Structural Engineering podcast, only a couple. And we are still learning so much about the AEC industry. And the purpose of the show really is to learn about the what and the why of those in the AEC industry. Let's jump to the intro.

3:57 - Madeline
Welcome to Enhance, an AEC podcast where we learn the why behind AEC professionals so that you can learn your why.

4:04 - Andy
Hey Mark.

4:06 - Mark Riffey
Hey, good afternoon Eddie.

4:07 - Andy
Welcome to the Enhance podcast.

4:09 - Mark Riffey
Thank you, it's good to be here.

4:11 - Andy
Good audio, good video, Well, yeah, glad to have you today. And we've met before, so, I mean, it's great to see you again. Seen you a couple times at some structural shows and SEA South Carolina, probably elsewhere.

4:33 - Mark Riffey
Probably again this year, who knows?

4:36 - Andy
So, and recently I saw we were posting on LinkedIn and you gave a history at a conference and I said, hey, you need to come on the podcast and share that same history of Intercalc. So looking forward to hearing about that and hopefully a lot more.

4:54 - Mark Riffey
Sounds good.

4:55 - Andy
But first of all, I want to start you out with a curveball opener. So you've been in software your whole life and also business is a long time, too. So debugging is something you do a lot of in both software and business. But if you had to debug, you probably see a lot of common behaviors in businesses. Is there a common thing that you would debug in a business if you could pick one?

5:35 - Mark Riffey
Pick one. You asked me at some point about business is personal. And to me, I think that's really it, is that it's really easy to get lost in spreadsheets and stakeholders. And I guess the best way to look at it is look at it from a PE perspective. When you look at how the private equity groups for the most part how they run businesses versus how you run your business the perspective is a lot different and I think it's really easy to lose sight of what's important when the first thing you do is check the spreadsheet I mean all of us have to make our numbers or we all at least have to be on the black side of the journal it's at some point, but when they drive customer behaviors or behaviors with customers to a fault, I think that's where a lot of businesses get in trouble. And you see that where in the last 20 years, PE firms have bought up a whole bunch of dentistry firms and rolled them up. And they have brought in some good strategies for those firms to make them more efficient and better record keeping and stuff like that. But they're also, I mean, when's the last time you spent 30 minutes with your dentist? I can't even remember. It's been a while. And so there's a lot of things like that where it's good for the dentist because they take on more money, but there's a balance there. And I think that we all have to remember that our employees have families. They work in a community. All that stuff is connected. Together, and if we forget that, we start making decisions that aren't necessarily for the right reasons, or at least not for the reasons that we originally made or created a business when we first started it. We wanted to be independent. We wanted to build something. We wanted to do something better than we had done it before for whatever reason. And all of that stuff, there's just so many fingers connecting that. And eventually it all rolls downhill to the community. The engineer who gets home for dinner on time has a happier family life, you would expect. And if the engineers at your firm are making good money, then they can afford the time and the money to contribute to their community. And so there's just all these ripple effects through that. And a lot of that starts with the behaviors, stops when behaviors go the wrong direction for those reasons.

8:32 - Andy
Yeah, it's easy to forget that, right? I mean, so having that meme, I guess, or that motto, business is personal, it helps you remember it. I mean, it's in your signature line.

8:49 - Mark Riffey
It does.

8:50 - Andy
Basically, right? I mean, like, so you, every time you send an email, yourself of that, plus your customers, or whoever you're communicating with, hey, this is personal.

9:01 - Mark Riffey
It is. And I've had a couple people tell me, well, it's not personal, it's just business. And they're kind of the same thing.

9:11 - Andy
I mean, sometimes you do have to make difficult decisions, and it's easy to make that statement, right? Like, oh, I'm doing this thing because it's It's just business. But it's impacting somebody, whatever decision you're making, it's impacting somebody. Whether that's an employee, whether that's you, whether that's a customer, whether it's the end user of this, in your case, a product, a software, but you're indirectly designing buildings through your software.

9:50 - Mark Riffey
It's not just that, but it's the firms we touch, the clients they touch, the employees of all of those companies, the people who live in those homes or that work in those buildings. There's just a lot of connections. It's a big deal. Business as a personal covers a lot of things, but to me, it's always really important to remember that you know, when we're replying to an email from an engineer, you know, they've got deadlines, they've got customers, they've got a community they have to live in. And all of those things, you know, maybe might not be affected by that email, but they're affected by what we're enabling in them. And that's just a part of it.

10:43 - Andy
So you have a software background. 40 what led you to get going with software 40 years ago?

10:55 - Mark Riffey
Well, 40 it's actually been a long time. I guess we're working on 40, this is my 46th year. Which is amazing because I'm only 29. Yeah, how does that work? You know, math. You know, I started off as an architecture major and I still have architecture to this this day, but this was in the early 80s, actually late 70s. And the second semester as an architecture student, out came the pads and the pencils. It's like, I'm not an artist person, or at least that's not my art. And I was just like, hmm, I need to think about this over Christmas break. And I came back and I switched to electrical engineering. And so it was a good time to do that because I was, you know, I was a first semester in school and I'm sure major changes happen a lot. The fact that I was able to switch so quickly, you know, without a whole lot of like, okay, this seems like a better idea. I did that because I was taking a calculus class first semester and for some reason I was enthralled with calculus at the time. I cannot defend that statement anymore. But anyway, it provoked me to move into EE. I had always enjoyed electronics and built amplifiers and preamps and stuff like that when I was younger. So I jumped into that and about a year and a half later, and when I was in school, I don't know how it is now, but you had to take, even if you were EE, you had to take statics and dynamics and circuits and all the, what I call, weed-out classes, the hard stuff that teaches you the fundamentals, but also weeds out the folks who don't want to work that hard, or whatever the reason might be. So I had to take a computer class as part of the EE curriculum, and this was a really new thing. So my first semester in that class, we punched cards. So it was not on a stone tablet, but just regular punch cards. Something clicked in me during that semester in that class, and I was just really jazzed by it. And fortunately for me, computer science was in the engineering department. So I got to enjoy all of those calculus and statics in like 24 hours of advanced math. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. All those things were not electives. Thankfully, they were part of my core program, so it didn't make me have to stay in school year and all that kind of stuff. So I switched to that. And that was fun. And then the next year, two old guys, probably at the time they were my age, came in and they taught a mainframe assembler class. And at the time, the mainframes were all we had. And they taught us how data actually moves in the machine, like how each command makes the data move and what happens during the execution execution of that command. And, you know, being a charter member of the OCD club, I just fell madly in love with that whole thing. And here we are.

14:18 - Andy
And now, what year was that, if you don't mind my asking?

14:22 - Mark Riffey
That would have been 1980. Yeah, would have been 1980.

14:24 - Andy
So, we hadn't seen the of the onset of the personal computer at that point yet, right?

14:38 - Mark Riffey
No, the next year the Dean of Engineering got a too floppy IBM PC and he thought he was Elon. I mean, it was pretty awesome and at the time that was a powerful machine, but he was really jazzed by the whole thing and now we know why.

14:57 - Andy
Yeah, so that's pretty amazing. You've seen a lot of changes in the computer arena. So you started in software, and then, I mean, I guess you've been doing that ever since, like programming. You did programming. Tell me a little bit about your background and what you did for your career.

15:22 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, so I've always been with a software company, or, well, there is one exception to that. I worked for Dayco, that built and hose rubber manufacture. But I was in their engineering programming department. So they had an engineering team and they had a programming team that just supported those engineers. And so they were a mix of chemical and mechanical engineers primarily. And a couple of automotive guys, but for the most part that was what they were. And we did things that supported them in their design work. And that was back in the days of of CATM and CATIA and stuff like that. Still in the mainframe days for the most part.

16:04 - Andy
Okay, and then, so those were helping the AEC, this program or this company was like an AEC company?

16:15 - Mark Riffey
No, no, they just made automotive and industrial hydraulic hoses and belts and things like that. Every other software firm that I've been with has been Every firm I've been with has been a software company, but Intercock was the first AEC software company.

16:33 - Andy
Yeah, okay, so this was automotive and then you've been in various industries.

16:40 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, financial services. I worked for a company that I was like employee number seven of what now would be called a FinTech back in 1987.

16:56 - Andy
But most of the time you were doing programming or did you move into management and ownership?

17:03 - Mark Riffey
Moved into leadership pretty much when I bought a company for the first time.

17:11 - Andy
Like you bought the company?

17:13 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, I ran into a guy who was trying to sell his software company and so it was one of these deals where he had an existing user base and he had all kinds of problems and they were just mostly organizational kind of things. They weren't really true problems that were unsolvable. So it was one of these things where I FedExed him a check on Thursday. He FedExed me a CD of source code on Friday. I FedExed him another check on Saturday. And then I learned the software on Sunday. And then on Monday in my lunch hour, I did tech support for that software from a laptop in my Jeep. In the Missouri summer.

17:52 - Andy
Hey, you were training for your remote work that you're in now, right?

17:57 - Mark Riffey
That's right. I was remote the next year, as a matter of fact, was when I started.

18:02 - Andy
You were remote before remote was cool.

18:06 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, I would not go back at this point.

18:10 - Andy
Okay, why is that?

18:14 - Mark Riffey
The thing I like about it the most is that I get to work anywhere. And what I mean by that is my wife and I went to Ireland for a couple weeks for our 40th anniversary a couple years ago. And I promised her I wouldn't open my laptop the whole time I was gone. She didn't necessarily believe me because I have a reputation. But I didn't open my laptop for the whole two weeks. And I did look at my phone. But the thing about when we went back again later, a couple years later, and I did take my laptop then, and I was sitting having breakfast in a pub, because that's where all the restaurants are, they're pubs. And I'm sitting in a pub at 8.30 the morning in a Zoom meeting, and a person on the other side of the call says, Mark, are you in a pub? I'm like, yeah, but a pub is a restaurant here, so. You know, you have to work when you're in Ireland? No, I get to work. In Ireland. I get to work anywhere I want to go, as long as there's internet. If I can take Starlink with me, then I get to do that anywhere. That's what I do when we take the camper out. So you love your job? I do. I absolutely do. The other part of that is, from a leadership perspective and a business owner perspective, the thing that's so powerful about remote businesses is I'm not limited to the people that can drive to my business where I am today. I can hire the best engineer I can find, I can hire the best programmer I can find, and I don't really have to care where they live. So it gives me a much bigger scope of people to choose from And these days, it's so common, people don't really think much of a second thought about it.

20:08 - Andy
20 years ago, Discussions had to be had and meetings had to be had but these days it's just normal well, you say it's normal, but really There's a lot of debate about this conversation for sure right now and Some people don't agree with you. So what do you I mean, what do you say about that?

20:29 - Mark Riffey
Like, you know, I don't run their business if they I mean, it's like if they want to run it that way and you know, I mean I do have kind of have a hot take on that And a lot of conversations about this I hear are, well, you know, I really can't manage people unless they're in the building. I can't really tell what they're doing and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, if you can't lead them remotely, you sure can't lead them locally. I mean, you can babysit them locally, but there's software to manage tasks and projects. We all use something, even if it's just Excel or a yellow pad. Or a whiteboard or whatever, there's ways of managing that kind of stuff. And if you're in a business where, like we are, where you're working with engineers and you're working with software people and you're working with CAD people and that kind of stuff, these are motivated, responsible people. If you have to babysit them, and I know that's kind of talking down a little bit, but it's like, if you have to be eye to eye for them, leadership reason, then I think there's something missing. There's a motivation missing. There's a leadership skill missing. There's things like that. Now, on the other side of it, from a creative perspective, having everybody's face in the same room is powerful as opposed to being in Zoom. But you figure it out. It's all about trust and communications and transparency and all kinds of things. We've got people from Seattle to Armenia. We've got a guy in South Africa. We've got a guy in Mexico. Almost everybody is in the U.S., but we're all over the place.

22:20 - Mark Riffey
We figure it out.

22:25 - Andy
I'm of the same belief. I do think there are pros and cons. I would say because of what you described with regard to the talent pool, that's the biggest pro in my opinion of remote work. Now I like remote work myself because I can shut the proverbial door all day if I want, right? Like I can shut off the world if I need to and there are times when I do that, right? Most of the time I'm available and you know people You can just reach out and call me and catch up with me or whatever, but there are times when you just need that, right? So that's one pro, but yeah, there's a lot of benefits to it. I've got this whiteboard behind me where when you need to create a sense of, I'm doing sheer flow calcs and screw calculations and all kind of stuff, but whenever you need to create that sense of, hey, we're in the same room, I mean, we were having in this conversation earlier, and my feeling was we were in the same room. So there are things you can do to create this idea that we're in the same room together, right? Analog tools like the whiteboard that we're used to doing, but then we're doing it on Google Meet or something like this. So I definitely agree with you, Mark, about that, but there are a lot of people respect that do have this mentality, like Dave Ramsey's one, he talks about it a lot on his LA leadership. And I respect him a lot, but this is one point I really just, I kind of, I mean, I just disagree with him on that. I can definitely see the pros of it and everything, but this is just one point I have to say, you know, I don't necessarily agree with that one.

24:22 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, I mean, yeah, the thing is, It's hard to have a remote oil change business. But there are people who do it. There's guys that run around in vans and do mobile oil changes. So there are some businesses. It's hard to manufacture electronic circuit boards in a remote business. So there's things that it doesn't make sense for. But for the things it does make sense for, it's just a game changer.

24:52 - Andy
you're with Intercalc now. So fast forward, you did software, you love your job with Intercalc, which is what we've been talking about, but we really haven't talked about it yet. So how did that come about with, let's talk about you at Intercalc first, and then we'll want to go get the history of Intercalc, because that was one of the things that we really wanted to hit on today. So how did you get started with Intercalc? How did you get started with Intercalc?

25:20 - Mark Riffey
So I went to a programming conference in 2020 in Gatlinburg, and I ran into this tall surfer dude looking guy. And we talked in the hallway for about 15 minutes about nothing, just programmers shooting the breeze. And we didn't run into each other for the rest of the conference. And that was the founder of Intercock. And so about four years later, Michael called me and he said, hey, could you do some sequel work for me? And I'm like, sure, why not? And I did more, and he asked for other things, and I did other things. And I eventually ended up building a whole bunch of infrastructure stuff for him. And over the next 13 years, he and I became pretty tight. And let's just say, at the time, At the time, in I 2017 came on full time, I knew where all the bodies were buried. It was me and Mike and until 2010, it was just me and Mike and his wife. One of the things that I told the folks in Arkansas, and I went into quite a chat about this, is that from 1982, until 2004 when I started working on the infrastructure for him on a part-time basis. He built that company by himself with a little help from his wife and a little help from his mom. He was doing all the tech support, he was doing all the coding, and then when I came on, there were over a million lines of code. There's like 1.6 million now.

27:07 - Andy
Now what year was that you came on board?

27:10 - Mark Riffey
When I started contracting with him it was 2004. If you go back in time and you talk to the people who have been with us for 25 or 30 years or more, and we still have our first customer from 1982, by the way, but when you talk to those guys, they'll say, you know, you guys are different than you were back then. I'm like, well, you know, I explained that to them. Mike was doing everything. All the marketing, all the billing, all the coding, all the support. And so when you do that, as an entrepreneur, you have to be very ruthless about prioritization. And that's what he had to be. And so as a result of that, That's what you got back then. You got what he felt was most important and what he could produce with the time that he had. And the fact that he was able to do that on his own and grow it to what he grew it to before I came on in 2004, I find it remarkable for somebody to do that on their own. It's quite a piece of work, let's say that. And then you throw the tech support and the marketing and other stuff on top of it. It's a lot of work. So he was definitely driven to provide service for engineers.

28:48 - Andy
And by the way, I've been using this program since you've been there. About that time is when I started using it, 2003, I think. Maybe earlier than that, about 2000. So one day I was in my first company we were with. I didn't even know we had the software. I was walking around the office and it's a very small office in South Carolina. And I'd always been, this is 2000. So I didn't even know we had software for calculations. I just thought we just handed everything, you know, like paper and pen and a calculator. So maybe a spreadsheet or maybe AISC manual. Anyway, so I was walking around, I saw this box, it was a gray box. It had about 20 disks in it, okay? It had about 20 of the three and a half inch disk in it. I was like, what is this? And so I finally figured out, okay, InterCalc. I was like, let me try this out. So I took it home, because I knew this 20 disks, it was going to take a while. It took so long to get all those 20 disks installed. You have to do one, and then it's like, okay, you pull out the disk and you do disk two. I've never done a program where it took 20 disks like that. It was wild. That was pretty wild, and it was built on Lotus 1-2-3. You probably remember those days.

30:19 - Mark Riffey
That's funny because today, really, our biggest competitor is Excel. That's when people are coming off of something else and they haven't used it and they're not using Yellowpans, obviously, they're using Excel. And so we started on VisiCalc and then moved to Lotus and then moved to real software, built with programming tools. And one of the things that Mike preserved, and this was like a line in the sand for him, and everything recalculates instantly. No matter where you change the number, if you tab, it recalculates the number. That all came from spreadsheets. So the irony that we compete with spreadsheets directly, but the most favorite behavior of the founder was that it acts like a spreadsheet. I just find that funny.

31:15 - Andy
Yeah, that is interesting. Anyway, I thought you might appreciate that.

31:20 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, that's cool.

31:22 - Andy
So I have a you know, an affinity for intercalc because I've used it pretty much my whole career. And so I thought this would be a fun one. This is one of the reasons I thought it would be a fun show to have. But so what got Mike, is it Mike?

31:41 - Mark Riffey
Michael Brooks.

31:44 - Andy
So what got him to start intercalc in 1982?

31:46 - Mark Riffey
So he got out of college and his dad was a, from my perspective, his dad was a player in the tilt-up and retaining wall world in Orange County. He worked with the people whose names you see, like Et Al and all the PhDs that are in the line, he worked with those folks to do the research to make the research that they were doing on tilt-ups and things of that nature. To get those into production. And, um, I can't remember the guy's name. One of them starts with a B, but it's kind of irrelevant. Um, that was his business. And so when Mike got out of school, he went to work for his dad and he was instantly in the grind and he found that he was doing the same work over and over again. He's like, I need to find a way to not have to do this again. Exactly the same thing and just change a couple of numbers. And so he went out and borrowed $9,000 to buy what today would be a PC that nobody would want to use. And that was the only debt that the company ever incurred. And he started making spreadsheets with VisiCalc and then he moved to Lotus and saved himself a bunch of time. And he said, you know, I'm probably not the only that needs stuff like this. And so he started going around in kitchen tables. And I just can't imagine, I cannot picture Michael carrying, because you know, you think about what computers were like in that time frame. The monitors were small, but they were heavy. And the computers were big, and they were heavy. And so Mike's lugging his computer in and lugging his monitor into somebody's kitchen, because that's how he would demo, and he would take it into their kitchen and set it up and demo it for them. And so he was doing kitchen table sales for a while, and maybe he would go to somebody's office, but it was that kind of boots on the ground kind of thing to get started. And then he started doing mailings and things like that and going to shows, and here we are.

33:56 - Mark Riffey
Here we are, okay.

34:01 - Andy
So what's different with Intercalc now, you said here we are, so what is now the difference Intercalc and I guess your biggest competitor, you say, is a spreadsheet. So why do I need to use Intercalc versus a spreadsheet?

34:19 - Mark Riffey
Well, the irony that I expressed about Excel earlier, you know, the fact that we act like that is not lost on me and I'm a big fan of irony. The thing about spreadsheets is, and I haven't ever asked Mike about this So I was thinking about this the other day. Okay, so you send a box with 20 floppy disks to Andy. Andy makes a bunch of spreadsheets. And then you make an update. How do those updates get into Andy's existing spreadsheets? I don't know. And I've never talked to Mike about that, but I need to. And so I was like, that didn't sound like fun. That's like a whole nother trouble spot for working that way that's gone away now because of software. But for the people who are working solely in Excel or majority in Excel, they have the same problem. It's nice to be right down to the bare metal in Excel. Where the problem occurs is like last year. Last year was one of these really fun code years. 318.25 came out, IBC 2024 got adopted everywhere, and so there was months, and ASC 722 is part of that, so it's just months of work to get all that done in our software. It was probably the biggest code effort for any single year that we've had in a long time, and it's just because the calendar years lined up when the when the intervals of the code releases come out. About that and you know now old-school Andy has 200 spreadsheets for the last projects he did and one of those guys calls up and says hey I want to add another wing to this structure so you pull out that spreadsheet and it was done in 2012 maybe there's some code updates I wonder what they are so you've got to figure all that out and then you have to figure out what changed in the code and you have to apply that to your spreadsheet, and now you've fixed that spreadsheet. But the other 199 that you may or may not end up working again with, they're still out of date. You've probably got a master that you used to start a project, so at least you only have to keep your masters up to date. But that's still non-paying work. It takes a lot of time. It's tedious. It's really easy to make a mistake when you're 916 rows on a spreadsheet, and it's just not productive time. And it's certainly not billable time.

37:07 - Andy
So that's a big benefit of it. Is there any other?

37:10 - Mark Riffey
The organization, I think, is, to me, I think it's something that doesn't get used as much as it maybe should. And that is that the project files that we have have got all the calculations in them, and you can name them and sort them and link them together. And do things like that. But the other thing that you can do is that if you get a PDF from somebody or an image from somebody or any file, really, you can attach it to that project file. And so they all travel around together. So it's kind of like sending a zip around, except you don't have to do the zipping and the unzipping and figure out where everything went and all that. You can launch whatever files you attach to the project from inside Intercop. Like the load linking thing. It's not like we were the first to do that. Won't be the last to do it, but it's kind of important.

38:09 - Andy
Yeah, so that was going to be my next question is, it seems like, now when did you become CEO? So it seems like Yeah, that's about right. Well, it seems like for a long time, Intercalc was just Intercalc. I mean, it works great, in my opinion. I'm a big fan. We use it at our company. But it does seem like it was just what it is, right, for a long time. And it didn't really have, I don't know, the only thing I really noticed, there was about two things I noticed. They brought in, is his brother like, his brother did like some stuff too, right, or something?

38:54 - Mark Riffey
Well, his dad, after he left his dad's firm to run Intercalc, his dad had somebody make some retaining wall software. And that was RetainPro. And then at some point in the last 20 years, and I don't remember what year it was, but at some point, dad was like, I'm really done with this. Could you take this over so my customers don't get orphaned? And so he's like, sure. So we took that on and supported it as is for several years. And then we integrated it into Intercalc in 2020.

39:28 - Andy
So that was one big change. Cause I remember we had to buy that separately and I'm like, man, that was a really nice change. Cause basically you got, you got that built in for no additional fee. Um, and, and you didn't have to worry about the two different softwares for retaining wall software. Um, but That was one thing, and then there was one other thing. Oh, the seats, but that might have been after you came in, the two seats.

39:53 - Mark Riffey
That was during COVID. Okay, so that was nice too. Yeah, so what happened there was when everybody, the way we saw it was, and we could see this in our license management data, it's like everybody went home on a certain day in April. I mean, you can watch it. And we started getting support tickets because people were activating the software at home for the very first time, or they were installing at home for the very first time. And we thought, you know, there's going to be a lot of back and forth. There's going to be office tag, you know, I'm out of the office now, you can go to the office or whatever. And there's going to be a lot of And this is going to cause a lot of commotion seat-wise. So we're just like, you know what? We're just going to give everybody a seat so that way they can work at home. Because most of our customers are small. I mean, you guys are big on the average. Most of our firms are two or three engineers. It's like, we're going to give you an extra seat so that way you can work in the office or you can work at home. And both computers will stay activated. And we're just going to do that. And so we did that for the pandemic. And then we got used to it. Users got used to it. And it just didn't make any sense to change it. So there you go.

41:24 - Andy
Benefits of COVID.

41:27 - Mark Riffey
It was a short list.

41:30 - Andy
There are a few, I guess, right? So I guess my point of all that was, it just seems like, and this isn't meant to be a knock, it's just, it was, there's a good and a bad of it. You know, InterCalc was a steady program that you could just count on and use and do what you needed to do. But then, you know, right about when you took over, there's now some innovations that we've seen, right? I mean, so you mentioned one just now, I mean, but do you want to talk a little bit about some of the innovations you've been able to bring in since I guess you've been in or in the past few years?

42:06 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, so where that really changed was in Thanksgiving of 2016, Mike called me and he said, I need you to find me a CEO. And at the time I was a development VP for an East Coast company and I had a team in Ukraine, so I was going to Ukraine every quarter and there was a lot of commotion in my life at the time. It's a good job, but it was also It was like, ever had a job where it was kind of awful, but you learned more at that job than any place else? Well, that was this job. So yeah, so everybody probably can at some level. But anyway, um, it's like, yeah, I need, I need you to find me a CEO. And I had a pretty good network. And, but I also, after 13 years was pretty close to Mike. So I knew who was going to fit Mike and who wasn't going to fit Mike. And so I spent, maybe three months trying to find somebody and I was like I came back to Mike in like February and I'm like I can't find anybody who I am willing to risk our relationship on by telling you this is the right person and I said and just kind of as a joke and I said and this was true because she did say this my wife says you really just want me to do it and he's like hmm Never thought about it, but yeah, I think you're, I think she's right. And so I came on full time in 2017, just kind of this, you know, because of my wife was right. And, um, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, the context of that was, I've never really managed a bunch of people. And at the time we had, including me, we had six, but that was still a bunch of people. When you're doing all the things that he was doing, managing three or four people was kind of a thing. He was like, I've never really managed people. I need you to do that. I need you to manage the team. He said, I need you to boss me around. He really didn't mean that part. I need to get things more organized than they are, and at some point in the next five years, I'd like to sell the company because I'm old enough and I'm ready to retire. I've been doing this for almost 40 years, and I want to use the best parts that are left of my life with my wife. I'm like, okay, so that wasn't really very important for about four years. In 2021, came to me and he said, we should probably think a little harder about this. So you've probably gotten these calls. You get calls and emails and text messages from PE firms, investment firms, whatever, we want to buy you, whatever. They want to roll you up and do whatever they want to do with you. Um, I was already pretty tired of them, those calls by then, because they, they come in with no context whatsoever. They haven't look at your website. They don't really know what you do. They just got your name off the list. Later in the year, Mike and I were talking like, you know, maybe I should just sell the company to you, Mark. I'll finance it. And you know, we'll take your equity as down payment and we'll call it good. And we'll move on from there. And when I gave him an offer, he's like, you know, I really don't want to finance it. If I'm going to walk away, I need to walk away. And I was like, I understand that. So we started getting a little more serious about looking for the right buyer. And that was because we, we both, and this, this got really emphasized for us during COVID was that we started looking at our numbers a little closer. Cause you know, that year you had to do that. Um, we only had like a little two you were still freaked out about it because you didn't know what was coming next. And we wanted to find somebody to preserve the legacy because what we had seen in a lot of companies that get bought out, especially software companies, they all get mushed together with other companies and then all the people who are making things happen no longer like the environment so they leave. And then the company kind of falls apart and the software fails and then all the users are left sitting there like that. Yeah, they don't know. What are they going to do? Can you imagine if we disappeared tomorrow and couldn't start the software? How painful that would be for the industry and 65,000 engineers? That's more than that now, but close enough. We were not willing to let that happen under any circumstances. And we both had decided that if we didn't find the right buyer, we would just keep doing it and we would figure it out. But we ran across a company that was interested in preserving the legacy and interested in making things happen long term. When we have long term conversations now, they are in the 20 40 timescale. They're not in the 20 to 40 minute or two quarter timescale. So that all happened in 2022. And that's why I became CEO in July of 22. I need a little background there. At that point, I knew we had to grow the development team because, first of all, Mike was going to be leaving at some point, and second of all, I just felt like there was some – you didn't say this, but I'll say it – was some reputational damage that we had simply because there was only one of Mike. And there was only so much that he could get done. And Chris and I were both like, this is something we have to focus on and pretty much focus on nothing else for the next 18 months. And so that's what we did. And so at the end of that time, um, we were almost not quite as big as where we are now, but, um, but we had knocked off a ton of changes and we We had started unload linking, and things that needed to get done were getting done. And the priorities that I gave Chris at the time is I said, I don't want to be involved in priority bug fix priorities every day. There's two things that are important to me, though. One, if there's anything that's producing incorrect engineering results, that's top priority. If there's anything that's affecting the presentation of engineering results, whether they're right or wrong, that would make the engineer the wrong decision, that needs to be fixed. Those two things are top of the heap. Everything else, you as a PE should decide. And so that's how we operated. And other than new things that we're doing, that's kind of how we operate today.

49:21 - Andy
Thanks for that background. So you mentioned the load linking. Which, by the way, this is AEC. I mean, this is fine what we've been doing.

49:35 - Andy
We did talk about architecture for a couple of minutes.

49:39 - Andy
This is totally fine, because we definitely get into the A side and the C side, and we're going to nerd out today for the engineers that are listening. But I mean, I'm sure there's some architects. My biggest fan is an architect. That's cool. But anyway, so you mentioned load linking. And I think that's a great innovation because I will say my, you know, internally, that became a bit of a conflict with some of my engineers that wanted to use a competitor software. And I was like, this is our, I mean, this is our process, right? We do what we do on what we call a key sheet, and actually if you open the original manual for intercalc, it talks about you need to not try to do your thing, like have the plans and have intercalc. He said really, he recommended to have, we call it a beam sheet, a tally sheet of sorts, where you kind of keep up with these things, and then you put it in the intercalc. And I did that from the year 2000, and I've been doing and that's part of our process. But anyway, long story short, we have a process for it, and part of that process is actually Intercal for our component design. Now, we do buildings where we design it in RISA and do some other softwares, and we use other softwares too, but that being said...

51:09 - Mark Riffey
When I see an engineer's desktop, we're certainly not the only one there. I mean, they're littered with every engineering software you can think of

51:18 - Andy
Yeah, I mean, you have to, there's so much designing, and that's the benefit of it, is it does so many different things. But the load linking definitely helps because you can, my understanding of it is you can have a beam and that load reaction from that beam goes to the next beam. And like with buildings that, especially houses, they don't line up. And you can have a link that just tracks down through the house three, four, five different ways. Defecting a footing all the way at the bottom. So that was a big impact, I think, and I'm excited to see that. There's some other interface things, but the Revit, I think, would probably be another big innovation, right? Would you agree with that?

52:03 - Mark Riffey
I do. The one thing that we've learned from that is that there are a lot of firms that the engineers don't do design work in Revit. So that That kind of limits the applicability of that. But if you do design work in Revit, and you're building a model, at least at some level, then it's definitely been a game changer for those firms. Because you can click on a beam, or click on a trib, or whatever, click on a whole floor, and bring all of that over to Intercalc and calculate it, and send the changes back. And there's no CSV files, and there's none of the mess that you don't want to do. Pushed in magic and it comes back.

52:45 - Andy
So just in case people don't understand, so if you're working in Revit and you have Intercalc, this is a special program of sorts called Intercalc for Revit, right?

52:55 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, it's a Revit add-on, so you have to have the full version of Revit to use it.

52:59 - Andy
Now do you have to have Intercalc, Revit, and then you have to have this third add-on or is that a part of...

53:05 - Mark Riffey
It adds into, it actually installs into Revit, so it's in the official Revit add-in. So it will show up on the Revit menu.

53:15 - Andy
So you have to have Intercalc to use?

53:17 - Mark Riffey
And Revit.

53:19 - Andy
And then you have to add that in as well? So, anyway, so you can design a beam inside of Revit, basically?

53:28 - Mark Riffey
So, and then when you click on the beam and you tell Intercalc for Revit you want to design that element, whatever it is, it will take the geometry physical geometry of that element, push it over into Intercalc, let you do your design work there, finish your analysis, make whatever changes you want to make, add any documentation you want to make. And then when you hit Save and Close, it pushes all those changes back into Revit, and the model gets changed for you. It doesn't require the analytical model. It'll support loads, and if you put loads on the Intercalc side, it will bring them back, and it will take them from the Revit side if they're there. It just depends on how you want to use Revit for your design.

54:09 - Andy
And definitely, well, you mentioned we're a big company. I don't see it that way. But I mean, I will say we have enough that whatever we do has an impact on cost, right? Like if we go in and look for Revit, that's a big number for us. So we really haven't been able to do that. And also to get Revit for all those engineers, full Revit is another number.

54:32 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, because it's named. Yeah, named engineers.

54:35 - Andy
So those are a couple things that we're dealing with, but I am very intrigued by the workflow. It's just hasn't been something we've been able to incorporate yet. So are there any, what's the next big thing for InterCalc? Like, is there any other big innovations you got? I mean, obviously you got to protect your intellectual property, but

54:54 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, yeah. I would get in big trouble if I talked about too many things. By the time this gets out, load linking for general footing will be out. So that will complete the load path. And my understanding is that will make a lot of people happy. We can expand from there. But getting the footings done was pretty important.

55:17 - Andy
Good to hear. That would be helpful. And that's something that we can use because we don't have to have Revit for that one, right? So that's exciting to know. So there's lots of things like that going on.

55:27 - Mark Riffey
One of the things that we did this year, or I guess last year, When we added support for IBC 2024 and for ASCE 722, we found a couple of states started kind of doing their own thing. They thought they were at the salad bar and they were going to make their own IBC. And that's become more prevalent. The states adopting codes before IBC does, and I think it's going to continue in that direction. And so one of the things we did was we broke out the code so that you can choose an IBC and have it like this project is according to this IBC and that's just the way it is or you can say the core of the project is this IBC but we're going to use ASC wind or whatever for this and don't make me keep changing the code for the project just use this code for this part of the project and that's what we're going to do or for the whole project so now you can you can go to the salad bar and pick whatever code you want want for the project and do your thing.

56:31 - Andy
Yeah, that's a good solution for that. And yeah, it's an unfortunate challenge that you have to deal with because it's called the International Building Code, but it doesn't seem to be very international, right? No, it doesn't. I mean, I do think, speaking of the year 2000, because that's about when the IBC came out And it did seem like that was gonna be the tone, and it was for a while. It was very much used ubiquitously as written. But now we see, like in our state, we have the South Carolina Building Code, which I still call it the IBC with State Amendments, is what I call it, on my plans, because that's the way I see it. But anyway, so that's a creative way to handle that. So those are some of the updates you have coming. That's pretty exciting. We got to talk about the elephant in the room though, of course.

57:30 - Mark Riffey
Okay, we can do that. I will say that there is something going on in the room over there. I can't tell you about it, but I'll tell you that you will really, really like it.

57:41 - Andy
This is your, you're working on it or?

57:43 - Mark Riffey
No, no, no. Well, virtually that room over there.

57:47 - Andy
Oh, okay.

57:47 - Andy
I got you.

57:48 - Mark Riffey
All right. Another intercog.

57:51 - Andy
That sounds exciting. So you have other things, you just can't talk about them necessarily. These are big things. What about the elephant in the room? You know what I'm talking about?

58:02 - Mark Riffey
I don't know.

58:03 - Andy
Well, the AI.

58:04 - Andy
I mean.

58:05 - Mark Riffey
Oh, okay. Well, I wasn't sure because for us, there could be many elephants.

58:09 - Andy
I mean, there's probably others, right?

58:14 - Mark Riffey
Well, not so much that. It's just, you know, I don't know. I don't spend a whole lot of time talking about competitors. I like to talk with competitors, but it just doesn't, I don't see a whole lot of ROI there.

58:28 - Mark Riffey
Make your product great and take care of your customers.

58:32 - Mark Riffey
The thing is, there's hundreds of thousands of engineers on the planet. We can't serve them all. I mean, if we had enough stuff going on in AWS, we could probably serve them all, but there's no reason for us to have to serve them all. There's plenty to go around. So I don't worry about that kind of stuff too much. As far as AI, it's really interesting. There's the whole black box thing, which I thought maybe was where the elephant was going, because there's the inner calc as a black box thing, which is something you may have noticed in the last two years or so, where you can right-click on intermediate results and get spreadsheet and things like that if you if you want to do that over on the right side on the input or on the outputs tabs we take that whole black box thing kind of seriously and the interesting thing I talked to Mike about it and he said you know when I was building all this nobody wanted to see that stuff okay I'm like you know why no they just didn't they didn't want the to noise. It was all about signal to noise for them back then. But today, it's about defensibility. And so, requirements change. It's just part of being in the software business.

59:57 - Andy
Yeah, I wonder where that came from It's akin to an urban legend. Somebody said black box and now it just can't be let go. That's what it feels like, I'm not saying it's I'm not saying I disagree with it. And by the way, which AEC podcast, so can you explain what you even mean by black box?

1:00:20 - Mark Riffey
Well, the reason I mentioned it is because we're about to talk about AI and that the knock on AI for engineering use is that I'm going to put some stuff in this inbox over here and I'm going to get a design out of this outbox over here and I'm just supposed to trust it. That's not how engineers work. And so it's kind of the same issue. It's a little different, but ultimately, the black box thing is something that any vendor using AI has just got to be cognizant of and understanding of And if they're already an engineering vendor, they should already know that. And I think they do. I think that's why you haven't seen massive rollouts of spectacular AI products yet because the tools until like October the tools were functional for the things that we've been using AI for for the last couple of years but for engineering programming and things like that they didn't really get good really good until like October this this last set of releases from from Anthropic, Opus, Opus 4.5 particular is spectacular. But to get back to the point of AI in engineering, one of the things that we have avoided is, look, we have the AI checkbox thing. We have a feature, we have a copilot in Intercom because we want to check the box and say we were the first or that we just have it. That's never really been too much of interest to us. I think there's some value in, can I have a conversation with this project file? But that's me, the nerd, the programming nerd talking. That's not me, the engineer who has to get stuff out for a deadline talking. And so when we talk about those kinds of things, I have five engineers to keep me on the rails. We have five engineers that all used Intercalc in the field before we hired them. And between them, they've got 40, of 50 Intercalc experience, maybe a little more than that. And they're kind of from all over the place. There's East Coast, there's West Coast, there's Midwest. And there's Northern West Coast and there's Southern West Coast. So, they have all kinds of mixes of seismic and then I go tell them about South Carolina seismic and they all kind of look at it like this until I talk to them, tell them about the soil. But...

1:03:15 - Andy
It's not, it's no joke here, man.

1:03:17 - Mark Riffey
No, it's not. I sat at a table for lunch at the conference that you guys had last year and it was a remarkable conversation about seismic and the soils and liquefaction and all kinds of things like that. It was pretty interesting. But anyway, I use them as my brain, my engineering brain. And the nice thing is because they have such varied experience and they've all been in the grind, I know I'm gonna get the kind of answer that I would get from one of our users about these kind of topics. And on the AI topic specifically, they're like, you can't be throwing things at me can't defend. You, the programmer, you, the software company, you, the software itself, have to be able to give me something that's defensible. Because if I don't understand it, or I don't believe it, whatever that means, Codechecker's certainly not going to do that.

1:04:20 - Andy
Well, and that's a fair point. I mean, that's one reason why I think you are seeing people ask for that. Is they have to have it. I mean, they have to have that for the code department. And we don't we don't need that as much here and where I'm at. But from time to time, we'll need to send a report out. But usually the report that we have is fine. So but I think you'll you guys are on the right track to to provide that information. But I mean, Anything else about AI that you want to mention?

1:04:57 - Mark Riffey
Well, for me, in the context of the conversation I have with our people is, unless it moves the needle, why does an engineer need this? And it's like, you don't need more stuff. You need stuff that you have to work better and faster. And more dependably and all those kinds of things. So I think there's certainly room for AI in our tools and in all the tools in our market. I just think it has to be done carefully and thinking about the engineer first and what they need, not just slapping AI on it so that we can put it out in brochures saying that we have AI in our software now.

1:05:48 - Andy
I think the competition, that's probably a factor too, right? It is becoming a competition.

1:05:55 - Mark Riffey
It will definitely be that. It will be, so and so did it, so we have to do it. Even if we don't necessarily believe in it, I think it's going to get to a point, at least with some vendors, and I'm not pointing a finger at a vendor, I'm just saying, the situation will arrive where you have to be able to do that. At the same time, I've talked to some startups that are doing some amazing work with AI and plans and template to design and things like that. I mean, they're focused on the one that I looked at recently. They do like apartment, condo, small hotel design. And the tool will allow you to basically design the whole building or the whole apartment complex or whatever. Oh, I want two-bedroom apartments, and I want 50 three-bedroom apartments. Make that happen. And here's the footprint that you have, and it will optimize that, and it's pretty cool.

1:07:01 - Andy
A lot of exciting things happening in your world of software and so forth. So, Mark, I want to kind of wrap things up here with you. You've been You've been generous with your time. And I want to just make sure we, I think we've hit on this, but the whole purpose of our show really is, you know, we enhance the world around us is our goal, you know, with what, you know, we want to talk to people that we believe have that type of mentality, right? And that's what we're, our purpose is of the show is are you stacking bricks or are you building a cathedral? That's the mentality of Enhance, but we've hit on that a lot already, but is there anything else that you want to add on to that as far as your why, how you're enhancing the world around you, and how Intercalc is doing that?

1:07:56 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, I mean, I'm 66, so I've been around a few years. People are, you know, I regularly get asked, like, are you still working? What's your story? I have the best job in the world. I mean, I'm not a baseball player or something like that, but I have a great team of engineers and programmers and they're scattered all over creation so I can roam the country and visit them. We're doing really important work for a huge group of people who really need as much help as they can get. And they're all a great people to work with. I mean, I've been in a lot of different businesses, and one of the things I find that I like the best about this business is that the people that we deal with are just the nicest, smartest people as a whole that I get to talk to. And, you know, every once in a while you might run into somebody that's a little grumpy, but for the most part, everybody's just trying to help their client get the work done. It's just a great group of people to work for and that's really why I'm still here. You know, I told the the owners I Spend maybe a half hour a week on the phone with They They asked me to stay on for a year when I came on in 2022 you know, I stayed here and took over and I said Now I happen to stay here for a year, but that really wasn't necessary to put that in a contract or whatever, because I'm here for a different reason, and that is that Mike built a legacy for 40 years, because in 2022 it was 40 years. My job is to position the company and the software and the team for the next 40 years. And that felt really arrogant back then, because I've been in the software long enough, like I said, punch card, so I've seen a lot of things. It feels really arrogant to say that because 20 years from now, I don't know what we're going to be using tool wise. I mean, it's going to be five years from now, it's going to be remarkably different. But you have to have fundamental things built so that you can adjust to those things and react to them and serve your customers. It's not like engineers are going away. So they're they're going to need our help. And I find it, to me, the most important thing I do is prepare this company to stick around and be ready for you guys and the work that you need done for the next four decades. And that gets me out of bed in the morning.

1:10:52 - Andy
Sounds like a killer purpose and sounds like a great company to work for. Too bad I don't know programming. I guess I could learn. I did start doing a little bit of programming.

1:11:10 - Mark Riffey
You can get a lot done in Cloud Code.

1:11:13 - Andy
I've been working on Python.

1:11:17 - Mark Riffey
If you can describe the problem, it will teach you a lot.

1:11:21 - Mark Riffey
It'll do all the work at first, but as you pick it up, you can start telling it how you want it to do things.

1:11:28 - Mark Riffey
You can build some great stuff.

1:11:30 - Andy
Well, I just, for me, I didn't know, I saw, I see a lot of people talking about it, like, okay, I gotta see what this is all about, and I'm a learner, so that was, you never know what you might learn, and then, I don't necessarily see myself as doing a bunch of calcs with Python, but I wanna help come up with new killer, like, we're always coming up with killer ideas, too, you know, and things that can help us get better.

1:11:56 - Andy
Well, Mark, it was great to talk to you today.

1:11:58 - Andy
Was there anything else I missed that we need to hit on?

1:12:02 - Mark Riffey
No, I think we hit the high points, and we hit enough of the Intercox story.

1:12:06 - Mark Riffey
The main part of it that I wanted to get across was I wanted it to be plain, just that what Mike accomplished between 82 and 2004 in particular, pretty much by himself, with the support of his wife, was just, to this day find it amazing.

1:12:26 - Andy
Yeah, it's really wild.

1:12:27 - Andy
I mean, it reminds me of, I just watched the Steve Jobs, and they were in that same era.

1:12:34 - Andy
So it's really wild because it reminds me of the Jobs with the, I watched the one with Ashton, there's a number of them, but the one with Ashton Kutcher.

1:12:43 - Andy
So he did a really good job of that.

1:12:46 - Andy
But it kind of reminded me of him, you know, carrying this big laptop or computer around in these kitchen tables and everything.

1:12:52 - Andy
I can just envision that.

1:12:57 - Andy
Now, he's totally out of the picture, though.

1:12:59 - Mark Riffey
Yeah, yeah.

1:13:01 - Mark Riffey
He left about three months later.

1:13:04 - Mark Riffey
We're still in contact.

1:13:05 - Mark Riffey
I mean, we swap emails and phone calls pretty regular.

1:13:09 - Andy
Yeah, awesome.

1:13:10 - Andy
Well, hopefully he'll listen to the podcast, and I hope we did a good job with it.

1:13:13 - Andy
I appreciate what he's done to help us, and I always enjoy hearing about entrepreneurs like him that have started something great.

1:13:23 - Andy
And I hope that you're able to have Intercalc going for the next 40 years.

1:13:29 - Andy
And by the way, everybody, so you can get Intercalc, what's the website for that?

1:13:36 - Andy
Boom, that's easy.

1:13:39 - Andy
And you're on LinkedIn.

1:13:40 - Mark Riffey
I am.

1:13:42 - Andy
And so forth, so you can catch up with Mark there.

1:13:44 - Andy
He posts every now and again about some of the updates going on.

1:13:48 - Andy
Thanks, Mark.

1:13:49 - Andy
It was great to have you.

1:13:50 - Andy
Take care.

1:13:50 - Mark Riffey
Thank you, Andy.

1:13:51 - Mark Riffey
Appreciate it.

1:13:51 - Madeline
Hey, everybody.

1:13:53 - Madeline
Thanks for listening to today's episode of Enhance.

1:13:57 - Madeline
And please leave a like, a subscribe, or a follow.

1:13:59 - Madeline
And we'll see you next time.